Dogs

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CreditIllustration by John Gall

By Bronwen Dickey

Oct. 17, 2014

A WOLF CALLED ROMEO

By Nick Jans

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.

Despite spending most of his adult life studying and photographing animals in the wildest parts of the Alaskan backcountry, Jans never expected that one day the backcountry would follow him to his own backyard. But there at the edges of suburban Juneau it does, in the form of a black wolf that steps out of the mist in the winter of 2003. Unlike the snarling villains of folklore, this stranger is no menace; in fact, the animal’s desire to be near people seems driven by a loneliness that borders on desperation. With neighborhood dogs, he is playful to the point of courtliness, inspiring the author’s wife to call him “Romeo.” Wherever Romeo came from, it’s obvious from the beginning that he is caught between his world and ours, as Jans observes, “a pariah cast upon our strange shore.”

As winter turns to spring and months turn into years, the wolf’s constant presence in Juneau raises an important question: Should a wild predator live so close to humans, even if he’s “friendly”?

For Jans, the desire to understand Romeo is deeply personal, fueled by regrets about his own wolf-hunting past, which he writes about with unflinching honesty. The story is also a sort of collective reckoning, as he meditates on the evolution from wolf to dog and the persecution of wolves throughout the American frontier.

Jans is an exceptional storyteller — no nature writer can top him in terms of sheer emotional force — and he frames even the smallest moment with haunting power. One afternoon, he falls asleep with his black Labrador near the mouth of a local river with Romeo nearby. “It was one of those still days when you could hear snowdrifts collapsing in hisses, the sun so dazzling off the white-crusted ice that we seemed suspended on a cloud, bathed in light radiating from below,” Jans writes. “There we lay, three different species bound by a complex, often bitter history, taking simple comfort in the others’ presence, the sun’s warmth and the passing of another winter.”

WAR DOGS

Tales of Canine Heroism, History, and Love

By Rebecca Frankel

Palgrave Macmillan, $26.

Even before the Army officially established its Dogs for Defense program in 1942, dogs played critical roles in almost all of America’s military conflicts. You would think that by now we’d know a great deal more about what war dogs do and why their presence in battle saves so many lives. But the literature on their history, their training and the impact they have on their human handlers is actually quite thin.

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Is a war dog “a furry but devoted weapon?” Frankel, a senior editor at Foreign Policy, asks. “A faithful fighter? A fierce soldier? A guardian who keeps watch in the night?” It would take her over a year of research and reporting to answer these questions.

What she finds is that war dogs serve so many purposes at once that their value to the military far exceeds the line-item costs of housing, feeding and training them, several times over. Buried under the bravado of even the most hardened military dog handlers — the ones who just can’t bring themselves to use the word “love” — the level of trust and respect they share with their animals is often just as strong, if not stronger, than the bond they share with their fellow soldiers. What’s more, multiple attempts by scientific researchers to produce a bionic “dog nose” for explosives detection that could replace war dogs haven’t come close to replicating the olfactory gifts of Canis lupus familiaris, and never has the need for those gifts been as strong as it is in Afghanistan, where the lives of American soldiers, coalition forces and Afghan civilians are constantly imperiled by improvised explosive devices.

Yet, as Frankel points out, the American government has an unfortunate habit of ramping up military dog programs during wartime, then letting them wither after the troops come home. This, she says, is a mistake; it forces a complete reinvention of the wheel the next time around. But there’s a deeper reason for investing in these programs, as well. “Just as war dogs save lives,” she writes, “they enrich them.”

TRAVELS WITH CASEY

By Benoit Denizet-Lewis

Simon & Schuster, $26.

In 1960, John Steinbeck set out in a truck and camper with his poodle, Charley, on a (possibly embellished) road trip in search of America. Half a century later, the journalist Denizet-Lewis, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine, sets out in a lumbering motor home he calls “the Chalet” with his Labrador mix, Casey, on a four-month journey around the country.

On the surface, Denizet-Lewis wants to learn more about dog culture in America by meeting scores of dogs and “dog-obsessed humans” and piecing together what our growing dependence on our pets says about us as a society. Really, though, he’s hoping to strengthen his relationship with Casey, who the author fears might not love him as much as he hopes.

As an entertaining, somewhat whimsical glimpse into life with dogs in the 21st century, the story covers a tremendous amount of ground, literally and figuratively. Denizet-Lewis travels through 32 states on an itinerary that takes him from the Westminster Kennel Club’s famous dog show in New York City to the controversial television personality Cesar Millan’s Dog Psychology Center in Los Angeles and beyond, with stops along the way to meet dog photographers, dog rescuers and even dog psychics, not to mention shelter workers, cowboys and dog-loving writers like Amy Hempel. Denizet-Lewis is warm, often hilarious company, and he does an impressive job of wrangling enough research to put his encounters into meaningful context.

At times, however, the breadth of the author’s project weakens his overall narrative. There are so many characters in so many places that a number of them blend together. At other points, Denizet-Lewis accepts claims based on shaky science too credulously. His visit to a Maryland animal shelter to explore “Black Dog Syndrome” (the belief that dogs with darker coats are passed over for adoption), for example, ends without any mention of the several recent studies that challenge the theory. But those minor flaws shouldn’t deter dog-­lovers from hitching a ride across America with Casey and his owner. There’s much to celebrate along the way.

Bronwen Dickey is writing a social history of pit bulls and their people.